The message

Yesterday I was too tired to do much more than lie on the sofa. As is becoming my no doubt slovenly habit, I watched a daytime talk show, the kind on which they spill the beans. It's the fashion now, bean-spilling: people spill their own beans and also those of other people, they spill every bean they have and even some they don't have. They do this out of guilt and anguish, and for their own pleasure, but mostly because they want to display themselves and other people want to watch them do it. I don't exempt myself: I relish these grubby little sins, these squalid family tangles, these cherished traumas. I enjoy the expectation with which the top is wrenched off the can of worms as if from some amazing birthday present, and then the sense of anticlimax in the watching faces: the forced tears and skimpy, gloating pity, the cued and dutiful applause. Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of yours? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain?

I wonder which is preferable-to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin-everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone-and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

I carry no brief, for better or for worse.

Loose Lips Sink Ships, said the wartime poster. Of course the ships will all sink anyway, sooner or later.

After indulging myself in this way, I wandered into the kitchen, where I ate half of a blackening banana and two soda crackers. I wondered if something-food of some sort-had fallen down behind the garbage can-there was a meaty smell-but a quick check revealed nothing. Perhaps this odour was my own. I can't overcome the notion that my body smells like cat food, despite whatever stagnant scent I sprayed on myself this morning-Tosca, was it, or Ma Griffe, or perhaps Je Reviens? I still have a few odds and ends of that sort kicking around. Grist for the green garbage bags, Myra, when you get around to them.

Richard used to give me perfume, when he felt I needed mollifying. Perfume, silk scarves, small jewelled pins in the shapes of domestic animals, of caged birds, of goldfish. Winifred's tastes, not for herself but for me.

On the train coming back from Port Ticonderoga, and then for weeks afterwards, I pondered Laura's message, the one Reenie said she'd left for me. She must have known, then, that whatever she was planning to say to the strange doctor at the hospital might have repercussions. She must have known it was a risk, and so she'd taken precautions. Somehow, somewhere, she'd left some word, some clue for me, like a dropped handkerchief or a trail of white stones in the woods.

I pictured her writing this message, in the way she always set about writing. No doubt it would be in pencil, a pencil with a chewed end. She often chewed her pencils; as a child her mouth had smelled of cedar, and if it was a coloured pencil her lips would be blue or green or purple. She wrote slowly; her script was childish, with round vowels and closed o's, and long, wavery stems on her g's and her y's. The dots on the i's and j's were circular, placed far to the right, as if the dot were a small black balloon tethered to its stem by an invisible thread; the cross-strokes of the t's were one-sided. I sat beside her in spirit, to see what she would do next.

She'd have reached the end of her message, then put it into an envelope and sealed it, and then hidden it, the way she'd hidden her bundle of bits and scraps at Avilion. But where could she have put this envelope? Not at Avilion: she hadn't been anywhere near there, not just before she was taken away.

No, it must be in the house in Toronto. Somewhere no one else would look-not Richard, not Winifred, not any of the Murgatroyds. I searched in various places-the bottoms of drawers, the backs of cupboards, the pockets of my winter coats, my supply of handbags, my winter mittens even-but found nothing.

Then I remembered coming upon her once, in Grandfather's study, when she was ten or eleven. She'd had the family Bible spread out in front of her, a great leathery brute of a thing, and was snipping sections out of it with Mother's old sewing scissors.

"Laura, what are you doing?" I said. "That's the Bible!"

"I'm cutting out the parts I don't like."

I uncrumpled the pages she'd tossed into the wastebasket: swathes of Chronicles, pages and pages of Leviticus, the little snippet from St. Matthew in which Jesus curses the barren fig tree. I remembered now that Laura had been indignant about that fig tree, in her Sunday-school days. She'd been furious that Jesus had been so spiteful towards a tree. We all have our bad days, Reenie had commented, briskly whipping up egg whites in a yellow bowl.

"You shouldn't be doing this," I said.

"It's only paper," said Laura, continuing to snip. "Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important."

"You'll get in big trouble."

"No, I won't," she said. "No one ever opens it. They only look in the front, for the births, the marriages and the deaths."

She was right, too. She was never found out.

That memory was what led me to pull out my wedding album, where the photographs of that event were stored. Certainly this volume was of scant interest to Winifred, nor had Richard ever been found leafing fondly through it. Laura must have known that, she must have known it would be safe. But what-she must have thought-would lead me ever to look into it myself?

If I'd been searching for Laura, I would have. She'd know that. There were a lot of pictures of her in there, stuck to the brown pages with black triangles at the corners; pictures of her scowling and gazing at her feet, dressed in her bridesmaid's outfit.

I found the message, although it was not in words. Laura had gone to town on my wedding with the hand-tinting materials, the little tubes of paint she'd nicked from Elwood Murray's newspaper office back in Port Ticonderoga. She must have had them squirrelled away all this time. For a person who claimed such disdain for the material world, she was very bad at throwing things out.

She'd altered only two of the photographs. The first was a group shot of the wedding party. In this, the bridesmaids and groomsmen had been covered over with a thick coat of indigo-eliminated from the picture altogether. I had been left, and Richard, and Laura herself, and Winifred, who had been a matron of honour. Winifred had been coloured a lurid green, as had Richard. I had been given a wash of aqua blue. Laura herself was a brilliant yellow, not only her dress, but her face and hands as well. What did it mean, this radiance? For radiance it was, as if Laura was glowing from within, like a glass lamp or a girl made of phosphorus. She wasn't looking straight ahead, but sideways, as if the focus of her attention was not in the picture at all.

The second was the formal shot of bride and groom, taken in front of the church. Richard's face had been painted grey, such a dark grey that the features were all but obliterated. The hands were red, as were the flames that shot up from around and somehow from inside the head, as if the skull itself were burning. My wedding gown, the gloves, the veil, the flowers-these trappings Laura had not bothered with. She'd dealt with my face, however-bleached it so that the eyes and the nose and mouth looked fogged over, like a window on a cold, wet day. The background and even the church steps beneath our feet had been entirely blacked out, leaving our two figures floating as if in mid-air, in the deepest and darkest of nights.